Ted Hughes
Page 56
At various points in his introduction, Hughes deploys phrases remembered from his undergraduate study of English at Cambridge. ‘Dissociation of sensibility’ is T. S. Eliot on what happened to English poetry around the time of the Civil War. ‘The Shakespearean moment’ is Cambridge-influenced critic Patrick Cruttwell’s phrase for the historical and cultural forces that came to a head in the 1590s, making it possible for Marlowe, Shakespeare and Donne to write the greatest poetry ever seen in the English language. Hughes redefines Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ as a rupture in English culture caused by the banishment of the Goddess from the national psyche. He sees the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Hopkins (perhaps), Yeats and Eliot as manifestations of ‘Nature’s attempt to correct the error, supply the natural body of things and heal the torment’.18 In this list, he is at once proclaiming a line of succession from Shakespeare to himself and offering a Gravesian reading of the Leavisite canon he studied for the first part of the Cambridge English Tripos, prior to his switch to Archaeology and Anthropology.
The copy of With Fairest Flowers that Hughes sent to Peter Brook was accompanied by a letter summarising the argument that had shaped both selection and introduction, together with an outline for a possible dramatisation that would set this argument, and Shakespeare’s work, in the religious context of his age: ‘Elizabeth and Mary Tudor go straight into the Venus lineage … Then it could be brought forward, using Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes as a continuation of Shakespeare’s series.’ There could be an epilogue in the style of the ancient Greek satyr play that followed a cycle of tragedies: rival politicians Edward Heath and Harold Wilson would be monkeys in the mask of Adonis and Tarquin, ‘Lucrece would be Princess Anne, and Venus would be a schizophrenic female gorilla in Regent’s park.’19
Though eminently capable of self-parody of this kind, Ted Hughes was deadly serious about his great Shakespearean project. Undeterred by the lukewarm critical response to his anthology, in 1973 he wrote a poem called ‘An Alchemy’ for a celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday.20 In a letter to fellow-poet Peter Redgrove (who would later visit Gravesian Goddess territory himself in both The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense and The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman, co-written with Penelope Shuttle), Hughes explained that ‘An Alchemy’ was a compacting of his anthology, in which he had sought to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s own personal psychodrama embodied the historical development of the national psyche, even the entire Western tradition: ‘Shakespeare recorded, somewhat helplessly, what was actually going on in the English spirit, which was the defamation, subjection and eventual murder of what he first encountered as Venus – the Mary Goddess of the Middle Ages and earlier.’ Venus and Adonis ‘sets up Shakespeare as the crucial record of the real inner story of the whole of Western History. But very abbreviated and in bagatelle style.’21
Hughes told Redgrove that he did not want to burden himself with an entire book, which was why he had worked out the idea in the abbreviated form of anthology, introduction and then poem. But he couldn’t let go of his desire to unlock the key to the plays. Eventually, in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, he would tell the same story in unabbreviated form and in a style that was no bagatelle.
In 1978, inspired by Hughes’s anthology, a Swedish actor and director called Donya Feuer put together a one-woman show called Soundings, which interlinked an array of Shakespearean soliloquies. She started up a correspondence with Hughes, leading him to write a long letter further developing his theory by way of a detailed reading of the play she went on to stage the following year, Measure for Measure.22 They remained in touch, by post and telephone. By now he believed that the fifteen plays of the second half of Shakespeare’s career, from As You Like It in 1599 to The Tempest in 1611, formed a single epic cycle. In 1990, Feuer wrote to suggest that she might create a production that brought extracts from all fifteen together in a single narrative. Beginning on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, Hughes sent her in return a steady stream of immensely long letters, which he eventually worked up into the book that was published two years later. Obsessively, he devoted almost all his time to the project. The archives of his papers in Georgia and London contain dozens of drafts, revisions, fragments, proofs, recordings of dictation, amounting to well over 10,000 pages of handwritten and typed material. Hughes later said that writing so much prose had given him shingles, destroyed his immune system, made him ill, almost killed him. To his old friend Terence McCaughey, he described the writing of the book as a two-year sentence in a cage in the walls of the Tower of London.23 The jaguar confined in the royal menagerie.
Faber agreed, with some scepticism, to publish the book. In the summer of 1991 it was put into the hands of a copy-editor, Gillian Bate. Each of her scrupulous and particular requests for clarification led Hughes to send great screeds of new material. Thus, in answer to a letter about routine copy-editorial matters: ‘I’m sorry to be so long returning this, but I wanted to clear up one thing that has been a difficulty from the beginning. The business of Occult Neoplatonism. One can’t just refer to this and assume that even Shakespearean scholars will understand and supply the rest. 400 years of cultural suppressive dismissal aren’t going to be lifted.’24 Six weeks later: ‘Thank you for the thousand improving suggestions. Don’t be alarmed by the enclosed …’25 The next day: ‘Dear Gillian, I’ve sent you the wrong note – in the text and as a spare copy – for page 344. By wrong I mean an early draft, a little unclear and missing the main opportunity. This is the most important note of all – clarifying every obscurity. Destroy the other one, so it can’t creep back in.’ A week after this: ‘Also, is it possible to have a note to a note. For instance, on this page 18 I would like to add a brief note to “prodigiously virile” – 9th line from the bottom.’ The note is then provided:
As the son of an occasional Butcher, and the nephew of several farmers, Shakespeare’s familiarity with pigs is not irrelevant to his myth. The imagination’s symbols are based on subliminal perception. The male, aphrodisiac, pheromone scent spray, sold in modern sex-shops, is based on a hormone extract from the Wild Boar.26
Another letter, the same day: ‘How are you getting on? This isn’t a new note, though it’s new to you. It’s an old note that I lost – and have now found. Could you tuck it in? I think it’s a Note, don’t you? If it were inserted as a para, at that point, it might be just a bit dissonant – in tone, in actual style. How does it appear to you?’ Gillian Bate sent a calm postcard in reply: ‘Dear Ted, Thank you for all your communications of this week. I am digesting them slowly and hope to be in touch middle of next week with any questions still remaining … I have to return all to Fabers end of next week.’27
Before the end of that week, another fat envelope dropped through her letterbox: ‘Dear Gillian – “What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?” This is a rewritten note – just slightly lengthened. But it struck me that the original was confused and inadequate. Just slot it in.’28 Then came a desperate plea: ‘The last bubbles of the last gasp. I know you are onto other work, that Fagin and Fagin, as my friend Leonard Baskin calls them, have cut off any more payment, and that you are ready to scream if you see that dreaded red-hot iron albatross – the word Shakespeare – ever again, but I am happy to refund you for any time this now costs: and refund you treble … Enclosed below are the last bits of wordage repair.’29
In November, Christopher Reid, Hughes’s commissioning editor at Faber, put his foot down and said that they simply could not implement the latest set of changes. This did not stop Hughes from making hundreds more corrections in proof, before the typescript was finally sent to the printer at the end of the year.
Various titles were considered: ‘The Silence of Cordelia’, perhaps, or ‘The Boar with the Flower in its Mouth’. Privately, Ted thought of it as his Dark Lady Book, but there was a Gravesian propriety to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Published on 9 March 1992, the book
was an attempt to read the whole of Shakespeare (though very much weighted towards the second half of his career) through the argument that had been aired in the introduction to the anthology and expanded across Hughes’s writings in prose and verse, on poetry and on myth, in the intervening years. ‘The idea of nature as a single organism is not new,’ he had written in a book review back in 1970, while the anthology was at press. ‘It was man’s first great thought, the basic intuition of most primitive theologies. Since Christianity hardened into Protestantism, we can follow its underground heretical life, leagued with everything occult, spiritualistic, devilish, over-emotional, bestial, mystical, feminine, crazy, revolutionary, and poetic.’30 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being presents itself as an excavation of the occult, the underground, Shakespeare. It is an aria upon those aspects of Shakespeare’s works that are most spiritualistic, devilish, over-emotional, bestial, mystical, feminine, crazy, revolutionary and poetic. Dipping one moment into cabbala and hermetic occult Neoplatonism, gnostic ritual and alchemy, the next into biographical speculation about Shakespeare’s relationship with the Earl of Southampton, and the one after that into the historical clash of Catholic and Protestant – ‘Shakespeare was a shaman, a prophet, of the ascendant, revolutionary, Puritan will (in its Elizabethan and Jacobean phase) just as surely as he was a visionary, redemptive shaman of the Catholic defeat’31 – it maps the Venus/Adonis/boar (sex/will/death) triad across the works, while also sketching a secondary theme of the Rival Brothers (another key Hughesian preoccupation, and one with autobiographical origins).
At several crucial moments, Hughes breaks one of the cardinal rules of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism: he links the plays directly to the life. It is unimaginable, he suggests, that when Shakespeare came to plot All’s Well that Ends Well he could have failed to recognise ‘just how closely the story tracked his own domestic life, and particularly that most decisive move he ever made – his first flight from his wife (for whatever reason). And his continuing to stay away, except for those visits.’32 Pursued by an infatuated woman, forced by her powerful guardian to marry her, haunted by her image when he thinks himself in an adulterous liaison with another woman: this is Hughes’s reading of both the character of Bertram in the play and William of Stratford in real life. ‘When Shakespeare was writing All’s Well that Ends Well the autobiographical secret sharer must have been breathing down his neck. To avoid it with a different plot, if he had wished to, would have been the simplest thing. But he must have searched out that specific plot for that specific reason – to deal in some way with that heavy breather.’33
Wilde and Woolf may assist again: this is Ted Hughes dealing with his own heavy breather, the ‘autobiographical secret sharer’. We have no way of knowing whether or not Shakespeare’s flight from Stratford and Anne Hathaway some time in the mid- or late 1580s was ‘the most decisive move he ever made’. But we know for sure that the whole course of Ted Hughes’s future life was decided by his flight from Sylvia Plath and Court Green in 1962.
Similarly with his account of the interplay of love and lust in the character of Troilus: ‘this new factor, the larval or introductory phase of the hero’s idyllic (idealistic) love, enables Shakespeare to connect his Mythic Equation to the impassioned enigma of his own subjectivity (as the Sonnets revealed it) in a way that is impossible to ignore … This helps to give Troilus and Cressida its autobiographical feel.’34 A bomb is exploding here. In short, ‘the loved and loathed woman in the one body’ is the beautiful, the desired, the unashamedly adulterous Assia Wevill just as much as it is Shakespeare’s Cressida.35 Hughes has thought deeply but above all feelingly, from experience, about heterosexual desire and its relationship to death in this play. He has less to say about the homoerotic dimension of the Greek camp – the question of same-sex desire is a conspicuous absence from nearly all Hughes’s work, which cannot be said of Shakespeare’s.
From All’s Well’s Helen, the bold and fatherless traveller who prefigures Sylvia, Hughes’s Shakespeare – or rather the Shakespearean Hughes – has proceeded to the dark, complex figure of Cressida/Assia (even the names echo each other), at once seductress and victim, on an inevitable path to a terrible end. Later, with King Lear, comfort will be found in the form of a very different woman, younger, de-eroticised and above all discreet. One of the book’s epigraphs is a quotation from Ann Pasternak Slater’s Shakespeare the Director: ‘Cordelia is the quiet absolute … her very silence is the still centre of this turning world.’36
Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was condemned by most academic critics as an extended eccentricity. Professor John Carey of Oxford University set the tone in the Sunday Times, accusing the book of fundamental self-contradiction, in that the ‘goddess-worshipping stance’ purported to ‘celebrate the female principle, fluid and fertile, as against the logical and scientific male ego’, whereas Hughes had adopted a pseudo-logical, pseudo-scientific and very male approach that extended even to his metaphors (‘comparing the plays to rockets, space capsules, nuclear power stations etc’). The eccentricities of the Hughesian brain were concoctions at complete odds with ‘the anarchic welter of his imagination’. Fortunately, though, his ‘poetic dynamism’ did at one point ‘break free from the rhapsodic muddle of Shakespearean exegesis that mostly entangles him’:
In a long footnote on page 11 he describes a huge matriarchal sow, gross, whiskery, many-breasted, a riot of carnality, with a terrible lolling mouth ‘like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with overproduction’. Although smuggled in as a hermaphroditic version of the mythic boar, this sow has absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare, and everything to do with Hughes’s violently divided feelings about women. A magnificent late-Hughes prose-poem, the footnote is worth all the rest of the book several times over.37
Dr Eric Griffiths of Cambridge University was moved to wonder whether Hughes had been rewiring his house, such was the profusion of imagery regarding Shakespeare’s voltage, poetic current, flashpoints and the like. As it happens, builders were in Court Green, turning the house upside down as Ted wrestled with the Goddess. Griffiths concluded that there were ‘28 pages worth reading in this book (beginning at p. 129). In those pages, Hughes pays attention to what Shakespeare wrote. The effect is wonderful.’38 The pages in question are indeed a masterclass in the close reading of a particular technique of Shakespearean verse, namely the rhetorical figure of doubling known as hendiadys. The analysis of one example from All’s Well, ‘the catastrophe and heel of pastime’, is especially brilliant.39
Hughes was stung but not deterred. He penned an essay called ‘Single Vision and Newton’s Sleep in John Carey’, which gave him the occasion to set off on his Gravesian mythical-poetic journey once more: ‘my Crow is Bran of the Tower Ravens. Bran who was Apollo (a Crow God) plus his son, the Crow demi-god Asclepius the Healer (whose mother was the white Crow Goddess Coronis), was the god-king, a crow god, of early Britain, where he was also the llud who was Llyr who was Lear. More mumbo jumbo to make [Carey] smile.’40 His reply, and a further counter-blast from Carey, were printed in the Sunday Times, which loved a good old literary spat.
As for Griffiths, he was an academic. Hughes did not pretend to be, nor in his worst nightmares could have imagined himself as, such an etiolated creature. He approached the plays, he said in his riposte, ‘like an industrial spy, not for the purpose of discursive comment, but with the sole idea of appropriating, somehow, the secrets of what makes them work as fascinating stage events, as big poems, and as language, so that I can adapt them to my own doings in different circumstances’. So it was that ‘Griffiths spends his days thinking and talking about scholarship and criticism. I spend my days, as I always have done, inventing and thinking about new poetic fables which, though vastly inferior to Shakespeare’s in every way, as I do not need to be told, are nevertheless the same kind of thing.’41
The one serious reviewer who seemed genuinely to understand and apprec
iate the book was Marina Warner, novelist, critic and devotee of myth, cult, folk story and fairy tale. Ted was deeply grateful to her, and struck up a rewarding correspondence.
The American edition, meanwhile, provided an opportunity to add some extra material, including a key sequence that Hughes had unaccountably forgotten to include for Faber, in which he worked out ‘The Tragic Equation in The Two Noble Kinsmen’ – taking him back to his early perception about the power and significance of that last play, written in collaboration with John Fletcher.
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being remains sui generis, and certainly cannot be recommended to students as an introductory critical study of the plays. But it does not now seem quite so eccentric in its entirety. Hughes always regarded the poet as shaman and prophet, and there is indeed something ahead of its time, something prophetic, about several aspects of the book. At the time he was writing, mainstream Shakespearean criticism was almost entirely secular. In subsequent years, there was a huge revival of interest in the playwright’s engagement with religious questions and in the possibility of a hidden vein of Catholicism running through his imagination.